Anti-Corruption Efforts and the International Circulation of Ideas

Date:

Thursday, September 19, 2019, 12:00pm

Location:

CGIS South, S030

Speakers: Matthew C. Stephenson, Eli Goldston Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Fabio de Sa e Silva, Assistant Professor of International Studies and Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies, University of OklahomaModerator: Bruno Carvalho, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures; Affiliated Professor in African and African American Studies; Affiliated Professor in Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

How successful has “Operation Car Wash” been in reducing Brazilian corruption? How compromised does the operation become in light of the messages exchanged by the prosecutors and judge involved in the case, recently revealed by The Intercept Brazil and other news media? What constructive role can U.S. academia play in anticorruption initiatives around the world?

Fabio de Sa e Silva studies the social organization and the political impact of law and justice in Brazil and comparatively. He holds a BA in legal studies from the University of Sao Paulo Law School, a Master of Laws from the University of Brasilia Law School, and a PhD in Law, Policy, and Society from Northeastern University. In 2015, he was a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession. Prior to his more recent academic appointments, he accumulated substantial experience in policy making and analysis in issues of law and justice in Brazil, where he served at the Ministry of Justice and the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) and consulted for international organizations like the UNDP, Unesco, and the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI).

Matthew Stephenson is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches administrative law, legislation and regulation, anti-corruption law, and political economy of public law. His research focuses on the application of positive political theory to public law, particularly in the areas of administrative procedure, anti-corruption, judicial institutions, and separation of powers. Prior to joining the Harvard Law School faculty, Professor Stephenson clerked for Senior Judge Stephen Williams on the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. He received his JD and PhD (political science) from Harvard in 2003, and his BA from Harvard College in 1997.

Bruno Carvalho works on cities as lived and imagined spaces. He studies relationships between cultural practices and urbanization, specializing on Brazil from the eighteenth century onward. Carvalho’s interdisciplinary approaches bridge history, literary analysis, and urban studies. Often, he investigates how socio-cultural processes of the past converge in and with the present. He is writing a book on different ways in which people imagined the future of cities over the past two centuries or so. A Rio de Janeiro native, Carvalho received his Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University (2009) and taught at Princeton University between 2009-2018.

Carvalho has written numerous articles, and is the author of the award-winning Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (a revised Brazilian edition is forthcoming). He co-organized a critical edition in Portuguese of United States constitutional documents, which circulated in Brazil and played a role in independence movements (O Livro de Tiradentes: Transmissão atlântica de ideias políticas no século XVIII, 2013). Carvalho is also editor of Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies: The Eighteenth Century, and co-editor of Occupy All Streets: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro (2016), Essays on Hilda Hilst: Between Brazil and World Literature (2018), and of the book series Lateral Exchanges, on historical and contemporary issues in design and the built environment.

At Harvard, Carvalho is Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, a member of the Faculty Advisory Committees on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights, and in the Brazil Studies Program, as well as a Faculty Affiliate of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, the Center for the Environment, the Graduate School of Design, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.